Cropping SVCD to XSVCD without reencoding

[suerpflysocal]

Is it possible to crop SVCD from 480 x 480 to 480 x 288 without reencoding? Reason is that the quality of SVCD is excellent but any encoding I have tried with CCE, TMPEG, Mainconcept, etc. have resulted in degradation of quality noticeably.

Also, can I do this without making it an avi?

[DJRumpy]

In short. No. You cannot edit the video portion of an MPEG, without converting/frameserving. You can only change the aspect ratio, DAR flags, pulldown, etc. Basically the flags added to an mpeg, but not the MPEG itself.

Why would you want to convert an SVCD from 480x480 to 480x288?

[suerpflysocal]

make it widescreen anamorphic. My dvd player does support it. at 480x480 the black bars are encoded thus making it not anamorphic.

i tried converting the xvid version directly through cce without frameserving to retain 640x272 and burned as SVCD. It worked but there is pixelation even at 2300 CBR. Original SVCD version has undetectable pixelation.

[vhelp]

suerpflysocal,

your problem may not be your dvd player, but your re-encoding method.

A suggestion would be to brush up on IVTC, since you are saying it is an
SVCD that you DON'T want to re-encode from due to poor'er quality after
re-encode.

Possiblies:
* poor encoding method(s) used
* frame rate
* audio
* source quality (may already have artifacts, but not as noticable, until it
.. gets re-encoded - final analysis via your method.. )

mind you, these are speculations, as you did not go into detail about your
clip.
-vhelp

[DJRumpy]

suerpflysocal, SVCD is 480x480. If you encode any other resolution, then your not making an SVCD, your just encoding an MPEG-2. I'm amazed that your player plays it back without complaining. The chips are usually hard coded to accept certain resolutions, according to specifications.

You seem to be confused as to what animorphic is. Depending on your DVD settings, and your television, you may get letterboxing. Even animorphic widescreen movies with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 have letterboxing on a 16:9 TV. Do you have a 16:9 TV? Also, what aspect ratio is your video source? Finally, what format are you trying for? It sounds like you want to place a fullscreen version of a 16:9 movie onto SVCD. Is this correct?

[suerpflysocal]

I have mitsubishi 55" widescreen and panasonic rp82.

I have two sources of same movie. One is SVCD (480 x 480) but with encoded letterbox so movie image is actually 16:9. Second is Xvid 640 x 272. Xvid is good copy but not as perfect as SVCD. I tried encoding xvid directly with CCE retaining 640x272 and burned as SVCD with VCDEasy and it played very nicely on TV filling entire screen without significant stretch on either direction. Problem is pixelation is introduced with reencoding. So far watching SVCD with TV in "stretched" mode is still better, since it is filling almost entire screen and without stretching of image, with diffuse finer pixelation from stretching but no "motion" pixelation. i am speculating that if I had this pefect SVCD with a non letterbox version at already 640 x 272, it would be much better than either of the above options. That's why i would like to chop off bars without reencoding, but it looks like you guys are saying it's impossible.

[DJRumpy]

It sounds like the DivX was re-encoded to SVCD during the process, which would answer my question regardin the wierd resolution. You can verify by dragging the MPEG from the SVCD to a program like MPeg Properties (you can find it in the tools section to the left). It should report the resolution of your SVCD.

If your movies is 16:9, which your description implies, then you can clip out the letterboxing, according to the aspect ratio of your movie.

If your movie is 16:9, clip off all the letterboxing and resize the remaining video, so your video is 480x356 (note, this assumes your movie's aspect ratio is 2.35:1). If your movies aspect ratio is 1.85:1, then you should clip out all of the letterboxing, and resize it to the full 480x480 resoltion. What were doing is forcing a 16:9 image into a 4:3 aspect ratio. When the image is stretched, it will look correct on your 16:9 tv. Make sure you set your mpeg's aspect ratio to 4:3, to keep it in spec.

[suerpflysocal]

when you say clip, using what software? The Mpeg properties you talk about or another software. It has to accept Mpeg2 as the source, right?

[suerpflysocal]

can i use vdub with mpeg2 as source?

[DJRumpy]

By clip, I mean editing it either a frameserved file, or an AVI. You cannot edit an MPEG. If you no longer have your source files, then you can re-edit our mpeg, although you will experience a slight loss in quality. The easiest method is with AVISynth, or VirtualDub and VFAPI.

The standard versions of VirtualDub do not accept MPEG-2 input, but there are modifed versions that will. No matter how you do it, you will either need to frame serve your MPEG back to an editor, or convert it to AVI to edit it.